


Meeting Starling

by gqbrielle (orphan_account)



Series: Meeting Starling [1]
Category: Hannibal (2001), Hannibal (TV), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The X-Files
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Past Abuse, Past Domestic Violence, Past Rape/Non-con, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4545789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/gqbrielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's just another day after work for Dana Scully.</p><p>Then she discovers Clarice Starling in her living room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> Plays fast & loose with characterization & canon, sorry. (:

Dana Scully comes home from work on a dark and clear evening. She can see by the moonlight filtering thru the blinds, so she neglects to turn on the lights while walking into her home, planning to start a fire (it's a bit chilly) and maybe listen to some music to relax.

It isn't until she's leaning over the fireplace that a soft exhale alerts her that there is someone in her home.

Her X-Files experiences have taught her that just because she can hear somebody, doesn't mean they can hear her or are anything more than a lonely spirit that has followed her home. But, just in case, she cocks her head back towards the noise, in the dark, and asks, "Hello?"

She freezes when an all too human, and female, voice responds.

"Hello, Scully."

"...What do you want? If it's money, I can direct you to some. There's no need to get...violent." Scully remains still, while slowly tensing her muscles for a quick leap sideways if necessary. She's not wearing her service pistol, but she's learnt to keep a knife (silver) strapped to her lower leg inside her boots, just in case. And that's within reach.

The voice chuckles. A low voice...an alto, or somebody who's had a glass of good whiskey and a few cigarettes.

"I don't know you. But you know me. I'm Clarice Starling."

Scully knows instantly who it is. She leaps sideways, gets the wall behind her back and the knife out and in her hand.

"They said you were supposed to be dead. Where is your...." she hesitates, "...partner?" She'd heard rumours, mostly based on things Starling's old roommate had said, that implied maybe Starling was coerced or drugged into the cannibal's arms. But nobody knew for sure...

Until now.

The voice goes serious, and cold. "I'm not dead. But he is. You have nothing to fear from that quarter."

***

It's an hour later.

Scully has flipped on the lights, and made food and drinks.

Starling has perched on the couch, a delicate-featured, muscled woman with brutally efficient short hair, skin the particular kind of tanned and freckled that shows a little too long outdoors at some point, and some scars that weren't in the profile.

One is clearly a badly healed broken cheekbone.

Scully has questions, but knows better than to ask most of them. So she waits. And when, finally, nothing seems forthcoming, she asks.

"First of all...do you need my help? And, if so, tell me what I can do."

Starling shivers like a fawn in the rain, but answers in a monotone while staring downwards. "If you want to call the FBI, I'll underst-"

"No. No. Absolutely not. This is about what *you* need."

Starling at least makes eye contact, with that. "I...I need a place to stay for a while. And no questions asked."

"I can do that."


	2. Sharps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scully comes home to find Clarice drinking....and engaging in what's clearly a pattern of self harm.

It's been a few months. 

Scully owns the house, so she isn't worried about breaking the terms of a lease or otherwise having to explain about Clarice. And hey, those extra rooms needed something to do other than collect dust and bookshelves, right? (Even the bathrooms have bookshelves, for god's sake.)

But she...worries. 

Starling has about 5 sets of ID, two from other countries. She got a job at a 7/11 where she manages, somehow, to not look like herself - to be fair, everyone looks dead and stressed under those lights.

Once the 7/11 got robbed. The guy had a gun. Scully thinks Starling might have let him get away with no bones broken, but apparently he tried to grope her. So, two broken wrists and a black eye for Fucko McRobber.

Scully worries because Starling is normal. Too normal. Normal in the way that means that she's repressing everything...and trauma's got to out sometime.

So, it's been a few months and Scully thinks of Starling as 'Clare' and honestly she's the best roomie Dana's ever had...

And she comes home from work, early, because it was a boring day and she and Fox had spent the day making origami and telling bad jokes to each other...And she catches Starling drinking rum straight from the bottle, in the living room, on the floor. 

And, Dana can't believe she never realised this before, but now that Clarice is wearing a sports bra and sweat pants and nothing else, my god, those are a lot of self harm scars...and some of _those_ are still bleeding...and wow, that is a respectably sized razor blade on the carpet next to the rum bottle.

Starling is drunk enough that she hasn't noticed that Scully is home, so Scully kind of waits. And breathes. And, when the noticing isn't going to happen...."Hi."

Starling goes still. Abruptly. Her shoulders hunch, and her left hand makes an abortive gesture that would have been putting her hand over the blade to hide it. But they both know it's too late for that.

Scully slides down the wall to the floor and sits. "Yeah, I see. ...It's okay. You should see Mulder's scars, he joked once that he looks like the poster child for Failed Suicide Attempts R Us..." 

Starling relaxes, a bit, and turns with the careful movements of somebody who is probably too drunk to walk unassisted. 

Scully jumps when Starling makes eye contact. That's only happened two other times.

She smiles. "He used to slap me when he noticed any new self harm scars."

Now Scully's really spooked. Aside from that first night, she's never talked about Lecter. Ever. "He?"

Starling grins sardonically. "Yanno. Lecter. Hannibal. Hanni. Lecter the Protector." Her mouth turns down a bit at the last, and then she goes utterly expressionless, eyes glassy.

"Protector? From who?"

"He never - " her voice roughens - " called himself that. I...came to think of him that way. Because of what...what happened...for a long time it was still. Better than what was waiting for me, y'know..." her eyes regain focus, glancing toward the door as she makes a gesture, "here."

Scully nods and...might as well say it..."I know the details. There are reasons I would never tell anybody about who you really are...Don't get me wrong, Lecter was a monster - " Clarice's hands become fists & her lip lifts slightly over her eyeteeth "- but yes, international flight for a few years was probably the best thing you could have done."


	3. Mulder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mulder knows about Clare...but not who she truly is.

Mostly what Scully thinks, later, looking back on it, is how very easy it had been to fool Fox into thinking Starling was just an anonymous roommate.

He was so obviously, embarrassingly in love with her, and she was allowing it to continue - partially because she didn't know what to do about it. It was returned, at least in the way that meant a relationship was possible (and possibly doomed...God, Spooky was so different from her)...but she knew better than to shit where she ate, and he was a coworker, god damn it.

Clare was also off limits, because, even ignoring all the /horrendous trauma/ she was a *roommate*, god damn it.

All this meant was that for months, Fox acted like a kicked puppy, because while he had been beginning to think that Dana might possibly (oh glory, oh rapture) return his feelings, she was now twice as irritable as she usually was. Despite the fact that she had a roommate, and therefore her rent had been cut in half, and that should make her LESS stressed, right?

He'd gathered, from bits of info dropped here and there, that the roommate...Scully only called her Clare...had been someone Scully was an acquaintance with who had offered to room with her, and Scully had accepted. Mulder still doesn't know why. After all, Scully's so prickly-minded independent she can hardly share a department with another person, never mind a home.


	4. Reflection

Clarice never kept diaries, before.

_People don't understand._

_They think it's like on television...that I'm just waiting to talk about it with someone. That it's constantly trying to leak through. That I'm the walking wounded._

_And I'm sure there's some truth to that, really._

_But mostly it's just quiet, in my head. I spent a lot of time around a particular pond, right after I got rid of him. Quiet. It was quiet. And sometimes bubbles would come to the surface, or some animal would crash through the woods nearby. But in between there was a lot of quiet. And the light changed._

_...._

_I didn't tell her details, that first time, because I was drunk. Or even because it was all laid out in the open and when you can see the blood oozing there isn't really a point to lying about it. Though I've tried before._

_I think I told her because she didn't ask. Because she didn't demand. She didn't stumble into the pond and start complaining about how gross the algae looked, or...or start digging up the beach to change the waterline just to make things more convenient for herself. She...she might have stumbled into it by accident, but she accepted things for how they were. She was patient._

_She watched the light change._


	5. Complications

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mulder coming over to dinner was not something Scully had planned to happen.

Mulder coming over to dinner was not something Scully had planned to happen. Or wanted to happen. Or, um, considered happening as long as Starling was living there or existed in any fashion near Scully.

However.

Clare had initially not understood Dana's fashion advice. "Why would I want my bangs in my face? And brightly coloured hair!" As she spoke her shoulders hunched, voice cooling rapidly. This was one of many habits of attempting to live without drawing attention that she had picked up from travels with Lecter, Scully gathered.

But, after an evening of using the Internet to display modern crowd scenes and the demographics of the area they lived, Clarice began to see the point. They agreed that dye was not a good idea, if only for upkeep reasons. Clare preferred wash-n-wear, as opposed to Dana's elaborate methods which armored her to walk in grey government buildings as confidently as in forests.

Clarice's eventual haircut and style let her begin to blend in with the endless crowd of students and new transplants in the city. Dramatic haircuts which mimicked a punk style until one took the pins out. They were complex, delicate structures that Clare picked up as quickly as she did the system for sorting Dana's personal weapons at the house. To the unitiated, they looked simple. But in reality these haircuts were designed for work in food service: out of one's face until they were off the clock.

All this to say that Mulder met Starling four months after she had begun working in a comfortably corporate coffee shop which primarily served frazzled physics students and sleepy history professors. They sourced their ingredients locally, though, so the smell had lured him onwards and inwards.

Scully was unfortunately familiar with Mulder's eerie personal charm, it had gotten them into manymanyMOST of their work 'adventures,' as well as making her own enmeshment problems with him worse. She hadn't considered, in she and Clarice's hard work to reintegrate Clare into modern life, what would happen if the two met without her there.

All this to say that she had come home from a work trip without Mulder, straight home, to find Starling much like she usually was after work: relaxed. Clare relaxed was very nearly a different person. Someone Dana cherished seeing and knowing. 

She remembered the reports Clarice's old roommate had given when Starling first disappeared, the brittle tone that became rote repetition of memories in service of making an updated profile, to quotes of the testimony with the emphasis in all the wrong places, the leering, sneaking, smeared nature of all the files. Dana had had some of those same men breathing eagerly in her ears when she made herself known at the FBI, so long ago, now, it seems...and when Clare's scars are noticeable in certain lights, Dana has to brush away the idea that they're not scars, they're fingerprints, bruises sunk to the bone and skin from being grabbed, pushed, pulled, shoved, over and over and over again.

Dana isn't so much as afraid of a mess as she is razor-sharp about boundaries. Clarice's areas of the house Dana has in her head, fondly, as "Clare's rooms" and no more encroaches on them then she would have dared to ask about Mulder's scars if he hadn't offered the information. So, when Dana nearly shatters the glass she's holding after Clarice says, offhandedly, "I met Fox at work today!" it's really surprise, not anger or, God forbid, fear.


	6. Fox

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fox comes to dinner.

Some people have mocked Fox, in the past, for how he responds to attention. He supposes he should be used, by now, to people in food service commenting on his strange first name. Banter. Teasing. It happens to everybody, baristas, bartenders, various people looking up account info, most of them have some kind of patter they roll out to ease the spaces between the strictly necessary words. But somehow he always visibly startles when somebody comments.

"Fox? Like the animal?" 

So many jokes from the friends he made as an undergraduate about how the very question made him look just like one. 

"Swear to god, Mulder, you look fine and they ask you the one little thing and you might as well be coming out of a henhouse with feathers in your teeth." 

(In the academy the jokes became stranger, or stopped altogether).

He just can't help it. He'll always be in his head, over his head, a little too much. 

So when Clare takes his name to scrawl on the side of his drink, and says, "Fox?" he goes still, inevitably, like always. But for once, instead of this reaction deliquescing into embarassment, it morphs into pleasure as she continues, hesistantly, "It wouldn't be Fox...Mulder, would it? You work with Dana Scully?"

For all he'd rather slide through the world invisible, like so many of the monsters he hunts seems to do, Fox also spends a lot of time feeling lonely and passed-over. For friends, lovers, family, professional attentions. Maybe that's why he finds himself grinning in honest, open pleasure, and responding, "Yes, actually. You're *that* Clare, then, huh?"

Later, getting out of his car in Scully's driveway, he marvels. The yard is so /messy./ Her side of the office is always so clean, he would never have imagined such a riot of flora in...on...her home. He's not even inside yet and he's already learning so much about - 

"Fox."

Stop. Turn. There she is, on the porch. Casual clothes, hair perfect....she's not carrying. Didn't she say she has a concealed carry license for when she's not at work - 

"Sc - Dana. It's good to...see you. Is Clare....?"

A twitch of her lips as she glances over her shoulder, hair fanning out to hide her eyes.

"She's just taking dinner out. She had some kind of..." - a hand gesture he can't interpret - "...recipe she hadn't made in a while and she said" - her voice changes in unconscious imitation - "'I remember how this needs to go better than I thought I would, but I need to watch it like a hawk. Can you go wait for Fox?'"

"She called me Fox?"

"I guess so. You really hit it off with her, didn't you?" Her eyes flick up to his again, alight with an emotion he can't begin to interpret. But then it's gone as she shrugs & gestures, with a completely straight face, "Come into my parlor, said the spider to the Fox."


End file.
